I also enjoyed it far less than I wanted to. Re: Your 2nd point : I find this really funny as I just started a sorc the other day and one my first reactions was how terrible the spell animations look for a modern game. I’ve been tempted to re-install Diablo 3 just to compare them, as I remember them being much better.

I finished the campaign as a Druid and am now tinkering with the other classes, so nowhere near endgame, all my feedback is just from the above.

• The writing is bad, laughably bad. Not like, bad grammar or sloppy prose bad but just like…written by a really edgy teenager and then heavily edited by adults who weren’t allowed to change any of the actual plot points bad? There were some good ideas (trying to avoid spoilers), but (for me) none of them ever went anywhere. And there were so many just…dumb/silly things…nevermind all the cutscenes rendered with the games engine that look laughably bad/amateur compared to Blizzard games like…what is going on with those??
• D3 items were a hot mess of garbage compared to D2 and I think these might be a tiny bit better, but still seem overly messy and the mod pool is too big. I also don’t think I found a “real” unique yet? They all seem like RNG trash just there for the aspects to be extracted? I could be wrong here, maybe the real uniques come later but if so that’s (more) bad design imho.
• frequent lag
• agree on the automap. Quest interface also seems poorly designed and very frustrating to use.
• the whole thing feels aggressively like a console game ported to PC, not vice versa. I strongly dislike that in my PC games.

FWIW, I’m enjoying playing my sorc more than the druid, but we’ll see. By the last 2 acts, I could close my eyes and hold two buttons and kill any of the bosses (except the last boss where you have move 3-4 times).

Mudding! Wow. Oh man, that’s some memories… scrapes the dust off brain I’m still a wizard/programmer on one that I check in on every few years, maybe fix a bug. Hope to have more time to tinker …someday!

I’m playing a summoner. Given than 5e doesn’t have a pure summoner/pet class, and that’s kind of “my thing” I had to give it a shot. It’s wacky as hell to run keeping track of all the actions and 1->2, 2+1 etc. trades, but I’m finally getting the hang of it. Hard not to get sucked into analysis paralysis land sometimes.

I uh…also took the Beastmaster free archetype so I have 2 pets at all times, not counting potential summoning spells. I haven’t sat down and did the math to see if that would even be doable with the action economy…:)

Edit: We are playing in foundry. I honestly don’t know if you could pay me to play PF2E on paper. OK, that’s a lie, you could absolutely pay me, but I don’t know if I’d do it for free!

I’m playing in a long running monthly 5e campaign (enjoying my character, even though its kinda out of sync with what the rest of the players want to do…I can roll with it) as well as a new PF2e campaign…one of the adventure paths. First time into PF2E for me, I don’t hate it, but I don’t love it! Boy is there a lot of looking things up - I’ve heard PF1E is many times worse on that front? Crazy times…then again I might have loved it at the time it came out (I was on a PNP hiatus for a while), who knows!

Running wise, I’m about to start up/continue-sorta a long running campaign (the last one is on hold in Tier 4/nearing endgame waiting for one player, so we’re starting up another a few hundred years in the future) in a homebrew world. Really excited about getting back to DMing and creating!